


Migratory Patterns of Columba Livia Domestica

by ama



Category: Community (TV)
Genre: Drabble, M/M, Oneshot, Personal Growth, Tattoos, Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-20
Updated: 2020-08-20
Packaged: 2021-03-06 19:08:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 890
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26003935
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ama/pseuds/ama
Summary: Troy contemplates the homing pigeon.
Relationships: Troy Barnes/Abed Nadir
Comments: 10
Kudos: 119





	Migratory Patterns of Columba Livia Domestica

**Author's Note:**

> I think this might be the first time I've ever posted to AO3 more than once in a day. This was a tiny experiment in forcing myself to write something short, direct, and uncomplicated.

In Auckland, Troy walks into a tattoo parlor and asks the first person he sees to give him a pigeon tattoo. He’s lucky she is taking walk-ups; he doesn’t think he would have the guts to go through with this if he had to wait. He doesn’t like needles.

“Don’t not look at it,” Wetū instructs him. “I’m almost done.”

“I can’t look at it,” Troy says, eyes on the ceiling.

“You don’t have to look at it, but right now you’re putting all your energy into _not looking_ at it. That doesn’t work. You have to actively focus on something else.”

“Okay. I like your accent.”

“Your something else can’t be hitting on me,” she says, unphased. Wetū is that kind of obvious, intimidating cool, with her undercut and the jade discs in her ear the size of his thumbnail and the black geometric tattoos wrapping around her arms, and he’s pretty sure she gets this a lot.

“I wasn’t,” he says. “I’m gay.” He pauses. “You’re the eleventh person I’ve told.”

“Ha, eleven is my lucky number. Tell me about pigeons,” she says. She pauses to dab at his skin with a piece of cotton, and then the needle returns, buzzing like an electric razor but stinging like an especially painful sunburn, or a really mean cat. “Feathery rats, aren’t they? No offense.”

“Pigeons are really smart,” Troy says, closing his eyes. “They can tell the difference between different people, or between different pigeons. They mate for life. They used to be domesticated, and they still kind of are, but they’ve adapted to be more like wild animals again. Not a lot of animals can do that. And, you’ve heard of homing pigeons?”

“Yeah.”

“They can find their way home over, like, a thousand miles.”

“That’s cool.”

“Yeah.” He swallows. “I’m about… seven thousand miles from home right now. I’m kind of traveling around the world. It’s a long story. I have this best friend.” He swallows again. “I miss him _so_ much. We had this… I guess joke, when I left. He joked that I had homing pigeon DNA. So that I would come back. And… yeah. I don’t know, this whole thing is taking a lot longer than I thought it would and I’m having a lot of fun but it’s also driving me crazy being away from him. And everyone else I guess. I just need to remind myself that I’m going back. You know?”

“That’s pretty good story. I mean, I think needing a big elaborate story to get a tattoo is overrated, personally, but people have worse stories. This guy, how long have you been apart?”

“Two years and four months.”

“Damn. And how long were you together before then?”

“Four years and five months.”

“That must be hard.” She sets the needle down and wipes the excess ink and a tiny bit of blood off his wrist again, and holds it up for his inspection. “Think he’ll like it?”

Troy looks down at the design on his arm. Not super realistic, but not too abstract, either—a pigeon in flight, mostly in black with a faint purple-blue sheen on its head. His heart swells.

“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, I think he will.”

Three days later, when he and LeVar set sail for Papua New Guinea, Troy realizes that she thought he was talking about his boyfriend. His tattoo is healing. It's itchy, but he's not allowed to scratch.

* * *

The Pacific Ocean is huge. Like, really, really huge.

Troy spent almost the first full year of his trip hugging the coast, going south down Mexico, through the Panama Canal, up to the Gulf of Mexico (cue brief kidnapping), and then around South America. The first time they really crossed the open sea, they planned it out carefully, taking the shortest possible route: the easternmost point of Brazil to Liberia. It was an emotionally fraught trip, from both a seafaring perspective and a traveling-to-Africa-with-Kunta-Kinte perspective. There were a couple of nerve-wracking days where Troy had really considered the possibility he might die.

The trip from Japan to Hawaii is an extra thousand miles, but Troy isn’t afraid anymore. He likes to sit on the deck at night. There are more stars in the sky than he ever imagined, even living in Colorado, because here they’re not hemmed in by the mountains. The sky is enormous, and the light from the moon reflects against the water like stars, and he can hardly tell where sky ends and sea begins. He’s never quite been able to put his finger on why Pierce wanted him to take this trip—but these nights, he thinks he gets close.

He leans back on one hand, the other wrapped around the ropes of the mainsail. His tattoo is at eye level. It’s becoming more familiar, but sometimes he’s still surprised to see it. He looks at it fondly. It’s small, this pigeon, not much bigger than two inches. But it’s flying forward, always. Never backward. It knows where it’s going.

Troy knows where he’s going, too. It’s been a journey of more than a thousand miles—more than a thousand, maybe closer than a hundred thousand—but he knows exactly where home is. He looks up at the moon and starts to sing softly to himself. The music echoes back.


End file.
